Mr. Flaherty is my hero. Not for his making of the Narnia films, though I appreciate what he’s doing there. But what I really love is the opinion piece I just read in the Wall Street Journal.

Speaking about Joy Behar saying CS Lewis writes children’s books, Flaherty says:

Mrs. Palin is on the right track by giving C.S. Lewis a prominent place on her reading list. Yet Ms. Behar and other Palin critics have dismissed Lewis’s work, forgetting that Lewis was a medieval and renaissance scholar at Oxford and the author of several brilliant Christian apologetics. Ms. Behar’s dismissal of children’s books as less than important makes her a modern-day Eustace, the type of bully who mocks readers of fairy tales as simpletons.

If I were a dufflepud I’d be telling Flaherty, “Yes, chief, you got that right. You said that one perfectly, chief. No one can say this better than you have.”

OK. You slackers who still haven’t seen the movie–too bad if you get spoilers.

We went opening night. Me, the old grumpy one, my son, fifteen, and my daughter, fourteen. We all liked this one way better than The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe.

And yet…

I hadn’t read the book in eight years so I sat through the movie amazed that I had forgotten so much. “I didn’t remember Peter being such a jerk,” I thought.

I didn’t remember that he attacked the city, either.

So I came home and pulled out the book and flipped through the chapters and it looks to me like half the movie wasn’t in the book and half the book wasn’t in the movie.

The movie worked. I loved it. I can’t help but wonder what Lewis would have thought of it, though.

What about you? Did you like it? Did Peter’s arrogance and sulkiness bother you? I always thought he was the noble one and I was a little shocked by his fighting and his bad attitude. Kind of the way I was bothered in The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe when the kids broke the window and instead of taking their lumps they ran away. That didn’t fit in with the picture I had in my head of those four Pevensie kids.

Edit: I should have checked Noel’s blog before I posted. Of course she posted a great little review the day after the movie opened. She’s so efficient, that one.

By far, the posts that get the most hits on this blog are the four posts dealing with Susan Pevensie which start here. The search words most used to find this little old blog are “The Problem of Susan” and “Neil Gaiman, the problem of susan.”

Thousands of people are searching to find out what Neil thinks about Susan, CS Lewis, and Narnia, apparently. Or they are looking for his hideous short story on the subject.

In celebration of the new Narnia movie, Prince Caspian, which comes out this month, I figured I’d give all you happy little searchers a new page to look at. Check out this fellow’s take on the problem of Susan–it’s a little long but read the first section, at least. It’s very good.

Happy trails. Happy reading. Happy heretic hunting.